The Future of Reading – Book to Video Conversion
I came up with the idea for the “Videobook” after reading the book Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne, and realizing that for much of the book I found myself struggling to visualize the concepts and animals that the author was talking about. Simply reading about shape-shifting squids and insanely agile hummingbirds could never convey their true magnificence the way that seeing them up close and in motion can. Abstract concepts, like the bifurcating tree of life, can also be difficult to imagine, but easy to display visually. Another problem that bothered me was that fewer and fewer people are consuming books as a source of knowledge. 28% of people simply don’t even read at all, and are unlikely to start anytime soon. This is unfortunate because a vast amount of humanity’s knowledge is found within books.
Contemplating these two problems ultimately led to the idea of the “Videobook” as a way to convey a book’s concepts more clearly. Working in conjunction with the author himself, my brother Matt and I began transposing the unabridged audio and text of Why Evolution is True into video format. The addition of HD footage of organisms and helpful visual aids brings the text of the book to life in a powerful way. The feedback we’ve received so far has been overwhelmingly positive, so we are very excited to see where the project can go!
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Other Science Videos
Hubble Deep Field Zoom
Looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 0.4 and 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field gives us a glimpse into the early universe, as well as a sense of the universe’s mind-bending size. I couldn’t find a video on YouTube that truly gave a sense of just how small a section of sky the HDF comes from, so I made my own.